Bob Hunter commentary: Red Birds open new stadium, begin historic era

Larry
MacPhail was new to Columbus. He was sent to the city in 1931 to run the American Association
franchise that the St. Louis Cardinals had purchased from the Cincinnati Reds, and it was
immediately clear to him that Neil Park, the club's old concrete ballpark on Cleveland Avenue,
would have to be replaced.

The
Senators teams that had been playing there were terrible. They never finished above .500 during the
1920s and were last in the league standings three straight years. The park, too, had seen better
days.

The
Cardinals gave Columbus a fourth-place team (84-82) in 1931 and a strong general manager --
MacPhail was on his way to the Baseball Hall of Fame for his management.

MacPhail,
though, still had much to learn about Columbus. Former Dispatch Sports Editor Paul Hornung used to
tell a story, relayed to him by one of his predecessors, of the day in 1931 when MacPhail asked a
Dispatch writer to accompany him on a little journey for a big surprise.

MacPhail
stopped the car at a vacant lot on the south end of town, got out and produced a long roll of
paper. When he stretched it out, it revealed a blueprint of a new baseball park.

"This
is where I'm going to build my new stadium," MacPhail told the writer.

Just
then the wind shifted, and a foul odor wiped the proud grin off the new general manager's face.

"What's
that smell?" MacPhail said.

"Oh,
it's the rendering plant, among other things," the writer said. "It always smells like this around
here."

MacPhail
rolled up his blueprints and got back in the car. Not long after that, it was announced that the
Red Birds would have a home on W. Mound Street.

Few
remember it now, but the Cardinals' farm club had periods of success during their 24 years in
Columbus that rivaled the New York Yankees' affiliate's incredible successes here years later.
During their first 11 years in town, the Red Birds finished first in the American Association four
times. They won the Junior World Series title, which pitted the American Association playoff
champion against the International League champ, five times in the team's first 13 years here and
again in 1950.

Many
of the players, managers and front-office personnel went on to stellar careers and/or fame. After
staging the first night game in Red Bird Stadium two weeks after its opening in 1932, drawing
21,000 fans, MacPhail went on to stage first-ever night games in Cincinnati (1935, the first in the
major leagues) and Brooklyn (1938) when he was general manager in those places.

Charlie
Root, famous for being on the wrong end of Babe Ruth's called shot in the 1932 World Series,
managed the Red Birds in 1945 and 1946. Burt Shotton managed from 1936 to 1941 and later managed
the Brooklyn Dodgers when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

Of
all the future stars that passed through Red Bird Stadium during the Cardinals' years, however,
Enos Slaughter might have had the best big-league career.

Slaughter
missed three years while in service during World War II and still had a lustrous, 19-year
major-league career, all launched from the monster season he had for the Red Birds in 1937. The
21-year-old outfielder hit a league-leading .382 with 42 doubles, 13 triples, 26 home runs and 122
RBI in leading the Red Birds to within one win of another Junior World Series title.

In
1996, he told The Dispatch that he made only $150 a month that season but admitted that the job was
not without its perks.

"They
had this Hanna Paint sign" in the stadium, Slaughter said. "If you put (a ball) over that sign,
they gave you five gallons of paint. I got 45 gallons of paint that year, and when I got home (to
North Carolina), my wife had me painting the barn, the fences, everything."

He
also received a case of Wheaties for each home run, enough that his descendents could still be
living on the popular cereal today. They aren't.

"I
fed them to the hogs," he said.

Joe
Garagiola had two stints with the Red Birds. The first came when he was 17 in 1943. He called that
year a "dream." The second came in 1948, after he had served in the army from 1942 to 1945, played
with the St. Louis Cardinals for two years and then was sent to Columbus. "Dream" doesn't describe
that.

"We
won the World Series (in 1946)," Garagiola said by phone from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. "It a
big thrill for everybody. And then I went back to Columbus in '48, and that was very difficult.
Being in the big leagues two years and then going back, that's a tough trip.

"Those
bench jockeys really let you know it," he said. " 'Big leaguer my a--.' 'The big-shot big leaguer
is back.' 'So you hit .190, huh?' It was brutal. I was ready to throw it in. But it was like a
turning point."

Garagiola,
82, had a good year for the Red Birds, returned to the Cardinals and played for six more years. His
big league time set the stage for a long career as a broadcaster for NBC-TV.

Attendance
for the Red Birds was all over the map. A team that was last in the American Association in
attendance in the late '20s, drawing only 93,205 for the season in 1926, drew an incredible 309,869
in 1932, the season Red Bird Stadium opened. But the combination of the Great Depression and bad
teams depressed the crowd figures, and the team drew only a little more than 74,000 in 1938 and
1939.

Attendance
picked back up during the 1940s, but the team's slump during the early 1950s, coupled with a
concomitant slump at the box office -- the Red Birds drew only 78,132 in 1952 -- prompted the
Cardinals to move the team to Omaha after the 1954 season.

Nick
Cullop was one of the Red Birds' most popular players and biggest stars, even though he had little
success in the major leagues. From 1932 to 1936, the outfielder hit better than .300 every season
and averaged 26 home runs and 123 RBI. He spent parts of five seasons in the majors before coming
to the Red Birds, getting the most action in 1931 with the Reds (104 games, .263, eight homers, 48
RBI).

Despite
his big years in Columbus, he never made it back to the bigs.

But
Cullop was a star on Columbus teams that won the American Association pennant and Junior World
Series in 1933 and 1934 and managed the Red Birds to another Junior World Series title in 1943.
When local investors lured a Kansas City Athletics farm team to Columbus to replace the Red Birds
in 1955, Cullop became the Jets' first manager.

By
then, he was remembered as the slugger who once hit a ball over the orange brick wall that marked
the outfield boundary in left field, more than 500 feet from home plate. But Dick Fitzpatrick, the
longtime Cooper Stadium park supervisor, told The Dispatch in 1994 that Cullop said he didn't do
it.

"Nick
told me that if he had hit one over the wall the way everyone said he did, he'd definitely remember
it," Fitzpatrick said. "But then I was at a luncheon with him one time where somebody asked him
about it, and when he denied doing it, probably a dozen people told him that he was wrong. They
told him they were there the night he did it. Can you imagine that?"

You
don't have to imagine how far it was. That brick wall still stands at the Coop, far beyond the
left-field fence.